|
|
Order Gary Noland's Venge Art CD With Your Credit Card |
|
Selected Music From VENGE ART is a multi-fascicle "chamber novel" in progress for narrator, musicians, actors, dancers, and culinary artists. One critic has described its text as "Joycean." Having a projected duration of over 150 hours, it consists of a six-fascicle proem in the form of a pseudo-essay that can be delivered as a series of lectures, and 124 chapters of fiction in the form of a novel. It contains over 300,000 words of text, over 500 pages of conventionally notated music (selections of which are included on this CD), more than 230 drawings consisting mostly of semi-abstract pen-and-inks and comix that function as graphic notation, plus performance instructions and legends that explicate symbologies and other devices incorporated into the text as improvisational cues, stage directions, chance operations, etc. Noland calls VENGE ART a "chamber novel." It is designed to be read as a "novel" (parodizing virtually every conceivable fiction genre), or it may be performed as "chamber music." He has designed this work to be realizable within the constraints of any available budget. It may be read as a monopologue by a solitary reciter or it may be performed by a symphony orchestra, full chorus, dance and mime troupes, theater companies, and chefs de cuisine flown in from the finest hotels worldwide. VENGE ART is a magnum opus that is, at the time of this writing, many years away from completion (let alone a fool realization on the concert stage). It has, thus far, taken Noland most of his adult life to create and may well take him the remainder of his life to complete. VENGE ART is the offspring of Noland's Herculean efforts to find a happy reconciliation between his musical pursuits as a composer, his visual artistic pursuits as an abstract artist and cartoonist, and his literary pursuits as a novelist-a conflict of interests that has given birth to an unprecedented form which he calls the "chamber novel." This CD contains realizations of individual musical works belonging to the oeuvre that comprises a portion of the music contained in VENGE ART. To hear an excerpt from a track, click on its title. 1. FANTASY IN E MINOR for cello and piano (Op. 24), 1981-84, revised 1992 Hamilton Cheifetz, cello I composed this piece during my "Strauss" phase. When I played it once for a veteran composer from the Old Country, he praised the piece but was sharply critical of a double elbow cluster at the end of the fugue section, a device I'd had serious doubts about incorporating into such an unabashedly overblowmantic work. Howso, on witnessing the hostile reaction it produced, my rebellious nature triumphed and all my doubts were thenceforth subverted. 2. HUMORESQUE for piano (Op. 3), 1983-85 Randall Hodgkinson, piano I was fortunate to be a graduate student of composition at the time (the 1980s) following a period in music history when composing music with functional harmony was considered a "crime against humanity"-an act, indeed, of high treason for which one could be banished from the halls of cacademe (and pilloried to boot). In despite of the general thaw that was in effect at that time, one still had to exercise caution about "crossing one's eyes" and "gritting one's teeth" in the presence of the old dogmatists of the Faux-Nihilist and Ersatz-Angst schools of composition. Thus, in a half-hearted effort to appease the powers that be (were?), I attempted to tailor the opening measures of this piece in such a way that it would sound as "dead-serious" as possible (knowing that no perfessor would ever look beyond the first page anyhow), and thenceforward debauched into functional tonalisms. 3. PORNOMUSIK: DO-IT-YOURSELF-IMPROVISATION-KIT for any combination of instruments, No. 1 (Op. 48, No. 1), 1971-2000 (parental indiscretion is ill-advised) |
|
|
Gary Noland, piano and voice. The score of "Pornomusik" consists of a fool-color twelve-page comic book I drew at age fourteen, replete with all the lurid imagery one expects from the fertile mind of a neurotic madolescent in the formative years of his mid-life crisis (thus the title). In 1998 I discovered the drawings in my mother's basement and thought they were worthy of resurrection. After giving some thought as to how I might put them to good use, I decided to white out their original text and replace it with gibberish, and in essence converted the comic book into a graphic score with about forty pages of accompanying deformance guidelines. On this recording I flextemporize at the piano while reciting text fragments from the score. The deformances of "Pornomusik" underwent elaborate processing at the expert hands of Jackie T. Gabel while under my slobsessive-compulsive stupervision. |
 |
|
4. AMERICAN BOZO DANCE for string quartet (Op. 32, No. 8), (from "String Quartet No. 2" in ten movements), 1993 The Onyx String Quartet This dance movement is about as close as I've ever come to composing "slop" music. It was written as a continuation of the movement that precedes it-a long, rigorous, and somber contrapuntal essay titled "Polyester Fugue" that builds in suspense as if it is about to reach a grand revelatory apotheosis, only to disappoint with a frivolous slop tune-a sort of quasi-commercial cantus interruptus, if you will. Composer Russell Steinberg has described this work as "a great ostinato of American kitsch." 5. RUSSELL STREET RAG for piano (Op. 5), 1974, revised 1986 Randall Hodgkinson, piano Named after a street on which I blew up in Berkeley, this piece is hysterically acknowledged by the Berkeley Historical Society in Tales from the Elmwood. I composed this at age seventeen, long before I was corrupted by my perfessors in college. It is a youthful work, full of apparent innocence and charm. In a review published in the Mississippi Rag, Butch Thompson describes it as "...like a classic rag, a composition deliberately in the old style and as good as any of its kind." 6. SEPTET for clarinet, alto saxophone, French horn, two violins, double bass & piano (Op. 43), 1976-77, 1991-92, 1995, 1998-99 (completed 1999) Conducted by Guy Tyler This is my attempt at "Frankenmusik"-an homage to J.S. Bach and other venerable composers of yore (can you name all the tunes?). I have explored the entire spectrum of moods from the obscene to the sublime, and then some. This was commissioned by the Oregon Music Teachers Association and MTNA for the 1999 "Oregon Composer of the Year" award. NB: One instrument employed in this piece I have discretionarily left unmentioned, for it is best left that way while in polite company. Snuffice it to say that it is a wind instrument of snorts on which one sits. 7. PORNOMUSIK: DO-IT-YOURSELF-IMPROVISATION-KIT for any combination of instruments, No. 4 (Op. 48, No. 4), 1971-2000 (parental indiscretion is ill-advised) Gary Noland, piano and voice. This is my "tip of the hat"-or "whip of the cat" (o' nine tails, that is)-to HMOs and other wealthcare institutions that are primarily known for their kindness and benevolence (read: blindness and malevolence) toward the Poor, the Sick, the Elderly, the Underprivileged, the Dispossessed, the Disabled, and the Disenfranchised. I have literally bent over backwards here in an effort to dispel any spurious notions that affiliates of certain unprogressive sectors in Amerikan schmociety might harbor in their misguided souls that such corporations and their badministrators are merely "toeing the bottom line"-i.e., that they are driven by base and selfish motives such as GREED (piffle!), or an insatiable LUST for POWER (balderdash!). Don't let's lose our faith in those humble leeches of the wealthcare industry, for they are infernally bounden to their HYPOCRITIC OATHS, after all. 8. GRAND RAG BRILLIANTE for piano (Op. 15), 1978-79, revised 1989 Computer-driven Yamaha Disklavier The world premiere of Grande Rag Brillante was broadcast on KPFA (Pacifica) radio to inaugurate its (then) brand new facility (in particular its Yamaha Disklavier) in Berkeley, California on 4 October, 1991. This work is historically acknowledged in Nicolas Slonimsky's Music Since 1900. It has been called a "masterpiece" and is, without question, the longest and most technically complex piano rag ever composed. I hereby dare anyone who calls him- or herself a "pianist" to perform it! 9. PORNOMUSIK: DO-IT-YOURSELF-IMPROVISATION-KIT for any combination of instruments, Nos. 6 & 9 (Op. 48, Nos. 6 & 9), 1971-2000 (parental indiscretion is ill-advised) Gary Noland, piano and voice. After the September 11th, 2001 suicide attacks on the East Coast, I realized, in metrospect, that some of the textual elements of this piece might come across as being somewhat...um...prophetic. But then, so are the sludge patterns at the bottom of my coffee cup; so are the gnarls in my ingrown toenail from the fungal infection growing unneath it. 10. ROMANCE for viola and piano (Op. 10), 1980-1981, revised 1983 and 1987 Katherine Murdock, viola When I asked a certain violist for whom this piece was originally composed (a gorgeous creature who used to traipse about en dishabille in a decrepit old excuse for a house where I happened to be renting a room, and whose name I shan't divulge) to give me her stupinion thereof, she asked me if I really wanted to know it, to which I responded, "Of course, my Horse, I'd be delighted to hear some CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISMS of my piece from the lips of the demi-goddess who inspired it." With a flagrant disregard for my sensitivities (fool that I was, I hadn't realized I'd just put my head on the chopping block), she answered that it sounded like "cheap, sentimental, imitation-Chopin trash." I can only hope that History will prove her snortsighted. (Same old story: "Every village has one," etc.)
|
|
